Filmmaniak

Dan Stevens ventures, with a psycho frown, into a quirky sectarian community on a secret island where his sister has been abducted. The film maintains its atmosphere and pace from the very beginning and becomes more interesting with the arrival of the main protagonist on the island, where the rules of the local population and particularly the special mythology, according to which the community was built on the island, are slowly uncovered. But then the sectarian colony begins to collapse from the inside (unfortunately), the supporting characters begin to come to the forefront, and the story of the main protagonist falls by the wayside. Because of this the film loses steam slightly in the second half, which it tries to save with grateful scenes with a medieval lobotomy and a meat grinder. Except for the juicy gore scenes, there's nothing much reminiscent of Evans's previous films in this historical horror movie.

This is what Ocean’s Eleven might have been if Soderbergh forgot about commerce and decided to stay artful. The main protagonist, planning to rob the National Museum, is introduced over a long period of time, including his complex family and social situation, and the robbery is flatly thrown in there in the first half of the story over the course of 15 minutes, so that in the rest of the film the various existential issues and identity crises of the desperate main characters, hesitant until the last moment, can be dealt with. This is accompanied by a number of original and even magical motifs and scenes deliberately shot in spite of genre assumptions, but the whole thing has almost no pull at all and everything is only focused on the targeted breakdown of audience expectations.

The first half hour with a lengthy wedding fails to introduce all of the roughly fifteen essential characters and the relationships between them (which you will slowly begin to understand later). The film then tells a story about a kidnapping that resembles an Agatha Christie detective story, but without a detective. The rest of the film deals with family ties and old wrongs rather than anything being investigated, but not knowing the abductors' identity at least brings an element of tension and uncertainty to the process. Thanks to the quality actors, it's not bad, but qualitatively it's on a completely different level than the director's previous Iranian films.

An interesting behind-the-scenes look at Putin's candidacy and election process, and into Boris Yeltsin's privacy. The actual records from Putin's first year in office are not as telling and they are, above all, shallow - including moments when Putin talks to the director and speaks directly to the camera. The documentary is presented as anti-Putin from the beginning, but of course only what Putin allowed the filmmakers to shoot appears in it.

A minimalist film with a sympathetic nature, set in two and a half environments and watching the humorously true skirmishes of an amusing family, in whose company everyone will surely remember their own family (the grandmother played by Jana Synková is the most exciting). Situations learned from life are complemented by an almost mystical and symbolic conclusion and the great casting pull the film to where dialogues are not enough and humor and plot are a bit bogged down – some of the motifs are not comprehensively resolved (for example, the son's relationship with his Slovak girlfriend) and not all of the characters are given the same care (e.g., the father and grandfather almost do not get the chance to express themselves and the character of the daughter of the German friend probably exists only so that there is someone to explain to what the phenomenon of Czech weekend cottages is). Otherwise, it's pleasant, non-binding entertainment.

From a technical point of view, this is an extremely carefully, in detail elaborated film with a strong theme and an impressive course, the biggest problem of which, however, lies in the basis, i.e., in the implausibility of the initial situation. It is hard to believe that an investigative journalist would try to infiltrate ISIS at the drop of the hat, with zero preparation and no basic orientation in the issue of the Islamic State, to think she will succeed, and moreover to get so emotionally involved in the whole thing. The second strange thing is that an experienced terrorist who transports a few girls a week from Europe to Syria does not immediately see through the act of the naive girl with an obviously newly created Facebook profile and a blank computer desktop, where there is nothing but a picture with freshly downloaded desktop wallpaper.

Visually, Pawlikowski excels even more than in the Oscar-winning Ida, which he copied through his black-and-white image and aspect ratio, and at least in the first half hour his film is able to enchant through its ferocious and dynamic direction and the story of a folk singing and dancing choir that must submit to the wishes of the regime. The subsequent main plot, a melodrama about two unsympathetic protagonists who would really like to be together, but do everything they can so that they can't be together, gets tiring faster than the omnipotent song ojojoj.

Family Film was a lot more hardcore art. Winter Flies, on the other hand, is a very spectator-friendly and relaxed road movie about freedom and liberty, but with an obvious social level and with the motif of a boy's coming of age. At the beginning, it is relatively difficult be on the same level as the film, because its main protagonists are a pair of teenage hooligans who imagine freedom mainly as car theft, running away from home, shooting at cars from an airsoft rifle and contempt for authorities, which the film feeds by presenting adult characters as careless and irresponsible individuals or as untrustworthy con men. Over time, however, you can finally empathize with the story and its characters, mainly thanks to the constantly-dosed light humor and the very natural acting performances of the main protagonists. In any case, freedom and relaxation have seeped into the structure of the film and some specific plot aspects, which seem very crude, whether it is the division of the story into two timelines told out of sequence, or the way in which one of police officers is "removed" from the police station for most of the film.

A genre-torn film that starts a new interesting topic every so often, but soon replaces it with another one or sweeps it off the table with a twist of the story without being able to use it properly. On the other hand, this results in at least the pleasant unpredictability of the story. It is very non-standard horror, although it does not deny its roots in genre classics and traditional motifs - but it is more of a social horror, which does not even act as a horror film for ninety percent of the run time and is in fact mostly not even filmed as a horror. Maybe that's why some of its purely horror or bloody scenes are inadvertently funny, although in the context of everything around them, they are actually extremely impressive at the same time. In addition, the tempo of storytelling is well drawn-out, and the film tries to start more and more different ideas over time, but not all of them can lead to a satisfactory completion. However, a few scenes are etched into your memory easily and for a long time.

A remarkable observational documentary about one specific event, which does not bring much new to those who are familiar with the Czech social and political context. Ironically, those who are not familiar with it will find it difficult to orient themselves in the film. The funny excursion to the tense workplaces of Czech Television and the Hospodářské noviny editorial office shows how things usually work at these media institutions (and what kind of people work there and how they talk to each other, even though you find out their names and job functions at the very end). This is a light-humor testimony about the difficult work of journalists, the cunning of the President and the mocking of the bizarreness of the Czech political scene.